A Mountain Out Of A Molehog
by RandomMolehog
Summary: Wandering the plains of the ice age in a snowstorm, a small molehog stumbles along. Fate might have frowned upon him before, but perhaps things will take a turn for the better now that he's left his home. One-shot: How Louis met Peaches and the herd. Written ages and ages ago in January 2013.


**Author's Note: I wrote this ages ago, but if you liked or disliked it, please do tell me why! I'll really appreciate it :)**

The molehog stumbled through the falling snow. The wind blew into him from behind, biting through his sharp quills and soft brown and white fur as if they weren't there. The sun, unseen through the thick layers of cloud and snow, was only just beginning to set, and though he had only been in the snowstorm for little over an hour, part of his mind told him that if he wasn't able to find shelter soon, he wouldn't survive the night.

Too weak to dig a burrow or even a small hole in which to sleep, he slowly edged forward, desperately looking for a hole in a tree or a hopefully unoccupied cave: something, anything that would shield him from the howling wind. The landscape was treacherous and unforgiving: rocky outcrops seemingly strewn around the place, leafless trees were arranged in little groups here and there, and a thick blanket of snow and ice covered the ground- this was the ice age, after all. Not that he could see any of this, of course. The falling snow swirling around him meant that he could barely see more than five metres ahead. Finding shelter now would simply be down to pure luck. And, as the feelings of self-pity began to overcome his numb body, he thought about how he had gotten himself into this mess.

He was your average molehog, really. Small for a mammal, yet of average height for his species, with white fur on his front and a dark marking in the form of a chevron just under his neck; a tuft of messy brown hair, a snout with his dark nose at the end, and sharp brown quills that lined his entire back. The large claws he had were well suited to digging, which he loved to do, as all molehogs must. And his name was Louis.

Unfortunately, he was painfully shy.

He didn't hang out with the other teenagers, digging alone whenever he could: he would leave the burrow in the morning, dig to a new place that he hadn't been to before, take in the sights (once he felt brave enough to get out of his tunnel to venture into the world above), before arriving alone back at his family's burrow just as the sun threw its dying rays across the sky. Why? He was worried: what other people would think of him, that he would say something stupid when he met them, that they would judge him as soon as they lay their eyes on him. People just didn't give enough time to see past his stutter, averted gaze and that annoying blush when he met new people.

"_Why am I like this?"_ thought Louis to himself as he trudged along, half blinded by snow falling into his eyes. "_Why can't I just be normal?"_

He tripped as the claws on one of his feet caught a rock sticking out of the ground. Sent sprawling, he landed face first in the snow.

His parents didn't care. Rather than worrying about him and trying to help, they had confronted him, ridiculed him, and, to cut a long story short- thrown him out. They didn't want a child who was like him. From their point of view, he probably wouldn't make it anywhere in life. With no friends, and no family left to support him, Louis had never felt more alone in his life.

That had been the day before.

Sniffling, he got to his feet. "Snap out of it," he murmured to himself, as he once more began to take notice of his surroundings. A predator, perhaps even a saber-tooth, wolf, or an arctic fox, could have snuck up on him and he wouldn't have even noticed! He felt far too exposed out here in the open- he was accustomed to the cosy, snug warmth that a burrow or a freshly dug tunnel offered him. Being Louis, he hadn't spent much time above the ground before.

"Maybe I should just give up," he mumbled. He could curl up into a ball: he would freeze and the snow would cover him quickly, and he would likely be found in the spring melt, a readymade meal, where he would make a quick meal for a vulture or a starving carnivore. By the end of winter, other animals were always short of food.

But as he looked around once more, he noticed to his left the dark open mouth of a cave. He had no choice: it was do-or-die, although the doing may well lead to death anyway. Caves were almost always inhabited, if not by predators then by aggressive, non-welcoming animals, weren't they? Cautiously, Louis approached the gaping, uninviting entrance.

"H-Hello?" called Louis from the entrance. He was shaking, but whether this was from the cold or his fear he wasn't sure. It was probably both.

Waiting longer than was really necessary for a reply, he went in. The entrance was massive, from his point of view- he was but a small molehog, yet this was probably large enough to fit the largest of creatures that roamed the continent. The cave walls, grey and jagged at the side, flattened into a smooth ceiling above him. The entrance of the cave split off into several different sections- and about ten metres in, it turned sharply to the left. And, to his horror, he could see the flickering of a fire throw huge, menacing shadows against the far end of the tunnel. Scrambling around, he made for the exit as quickly as he could with the little energy that he had left, hoping at all costs to avoid a confrontation- only to be immediately cut off.

"What'cha doing, kid?" said a voice.

Gasping, Louis looked up, only to see the scariest sight of his life right in front of his eyes: a large, orange saber-tooth tiger towering over him. As he started trembling, Louis could only see the teeth, the large, sharp teeth, which were just under a quarter as long as he was tall, jutting out from the saber's mouth.

"Well, this is it," he thought to himself sadly, petrified to the ground in fear. "All my life, leading up to being an insignificant meal for a saber. I wish I could have done something better with it."

He started shaking even harder.

"Hello? Hey, don't worry," said the saber, waving a paw in front of Louis' face as the molehog, wide- and teary-eyed, started backing up against the cave wall. "I'm not gonna eat you." He chuckled to himself: "Peaches would have my fur as a rug if I did. Besides, you're just a kid."

But Louis wasn't really listening: he was hyperventilating in panic, his fight-or-flight response kicking in more than it ever had before, trying to judge if he had enough energy and willpower left for a final dig for freedom.

The saber turned his head over his shoulder and called out, "Uh, Ellie? I could use some help over here! There's this molehog..."

The molehog in question saw his chance and took it. With the saber distracted, he dove into the ground as fast as he could and burrowed away, leaving a trail of chipped dirt behind and above him.

"Hey!"

Louis dug for his life, his muscles aching, his claws a blur as they displaced the dirt ahead of him. But he was weak and it showed. Just as he was about to collapse from exhaustion, a paw was thrusted down into the ground above him, at which point it grabbed him and yanked him above the ground before setting him back down on it.

It had been, of course, the still nameless saber-tooth. And standing next to him, almost three times as tall as the saber and gently waving her trunk at the molehog, was a mammoth! A real mammoth, which Louis had never seen before!

The day had been too much for him. Whether from shock, stress, fear and pure exhaustion, he collapsed, the only delirious thought occurring to him at this point as he slumped into unconsciousness being: "I hope that mammoths don't eat molehogs too..."

* * *

><p>As it happened, mammoths didn't eat molehogs. But he wasn't to know, and as he came to only a few seconds later clutched in the trunk of the mammoth he had seen before fainting, he curled himself up as best he could into a quivering, spiny ball.<p>

The mammoth stopped as she rounded the corner into the part of the cave that Louis had seen the flickerings of a fire from. The saber stalked off into a corner and closed his eyes. Meanwhile, Louis was gently set down by the fire.

"It's OK, sweetie, you're safe now. The weather's pretty awful outside, isn't it? You can stay here 'till the storm has passed through, if you want."

Louis, visibly still terrified, peeked out cautiously, watching the massive tusks, several times longer than even the saber's teeth.

"Y-you're not going to e-eat me?"

She burst out laughing.

"I'm a mammoth!"

At Louis's blank yet fearful look she explained- "We're herbivores! We don't eat other animals!"

Louis mentally kicked himself for thinking something so silly. This was his main fear- he had only been talking to this new acquaintance for less than a minute but had already made a fool of himself! He lowered his gaze in shame, but kept a nervous look towards the saber in the corner.

Spotting the direction of his uncertain gaze, she continued:

"Oh, don't mind him. He might look scary, but he's nice and friendly once you get to know him."

"Hey!"

"That wasn't an insult, Diego. Just go to sleep."

The saber huffed, and once more closed his eyes. Meanwhile Louis, now at least assured of his immediate safety but still faced with the daunting prospect of meeting new animals, looked around the rest of the cave. Two other mammoths were sleeping around the fire, and a sloth, mumbling and kicking in his sleep while constantly changing position on the slab of bark on which he slept, lay next to them, alongside the saber. Two possums were precariously sleeping in a sitting position back-to-back next to the younger mammoth, seeming with every snore as if they would slip off the other, but somehow managing not to.

"I'm Ellie," the mammoth explained, gesturing with her trunk, "and that's Manny, my daughter Peaches, Crash and Eddie, Sid, and, well, you already met Diego. What's your name?"

"L-Louis..." he said timidly.

"Well, hi! Nice to meet you! You're welcome to stay here with us for a while if you want, at least until the blizzard's over. You look around the same age as Peaches, I'm sure you'll get along."

"Huh?" Louis could hardly believe his luck. Fully expecting to be kicked out as soon as possible of the cave belonging to the somewhat strange herd and not used to such frivolous acts of kindness directed towards him, he wasn't sure how to react. His shyness didn't help much with this either.

Raising his gaze to the mammoth's head several feet above him, he couldn't help but ask tentatively: "Are- are you sure? I don't want to be any trouble, honest!"

"It's more than fine!" exclaimed Ellie. "And if Manny has a problem with it in the morning, he'll have me to answer to."

"W-wow...um, thanks. I promise I won't bother anyone...I'll go in the corner, I don't want to take someone's place by the fire." And so Louis walked over in a dark obscure corner and curled up in a small spiked ball.

"You can sleep next to the fire if you want to, there's more than enough space- but if that's what you want...Anyway, goodnight, Louis."

"Goodnight, and...thank you" whispered the molehog, barely audible above the fierce crackling of the smouldering fire.

The vibrations shook Louis as the female mammoth trundled over to lie down next to her mate. He closed his eyes, but, cold as it was in his corner of the cave far away from the fire, and still not nearly close to recovered from his long trek in the blizzard, he began to shiver.

"I should've sat near the fire... but then she would've thought that I was taking advantage of her kindness," thought Louis. "And I'd already made myself seem stupid once in less than ten minutes. I guess I'm just lucky that she didn't kick me out straight after that..."

He continued to shiver. Although he didn't realise it, as his body temperature continued to drop, he was shivering more and more violently.

Just then, as Louis once more felt overcome with sorrow at his predicament, he felt what could only be a mammoth's trunk wrap around him. With a yelp, he was plucked into the air. Opening his eyes wide and gripping onto the trunk with fear, he turned to see Ellie's daughter, previously asleep by the fire, carrying him towards it. Had she overheard his and Ellie's conversation and not liked the sound of him, and decided to feed him to the dancing flames? But as Louis looked up at her eyes, he saw none of the malice that he so often spotted in the eyes of other animals his age. Was it Peaches that Ellie had said her name was? Louis wished that he had listened more closely. Either way, this new mammoth lay down by the fire, leaving Louis close enough to benefit from its warmth, and half unwrapped her trunk from around him, leaving one of his sides facing the flames and the other protected from the open cold of her cave by her trunk. Still grabbing her trunk and with his eyes wide and ears back, all Louis could do was murmur his thanks.

The mammoth giggled.

"You looked like you needed it. I'm Peaches, by the way. You?"

"I'm...Louis."

And so the mammoth and molehog closed their eyes, and, both comfortable for the time being, soon fell asleep. For the mammoth, it was a simple dreamless night, but for the molehog, it was filled with the hope that maybe, just maybe, he had just found someone that he could one day call his friend.


End file.
